Children, spouses, cousins: one in six MEPs employs a loved one as an employee

The Fillon affair has shed full light on the role of parliamentary assistants and revived the debate on a fairly widespread practice: the employment by parliamentarians of members of their family, for functions that are not always very well defined.

For the sake of transparency, the National Assembly published on Tuesday February 21 the updated list of the 2,039 collaborators of the 572 deputies in activity. It is quite easy to detect similar surnames which suggest family ties, without them being explicitly specified in the document (although the Assembly has this information, declared by the deputies but not public).

A few days earlier, Le Monde had launched an operation called #TransparenceAN, inviting all deputies to declare family ties with their collaborators. After a week, nearly 200 of them have responded. By crossing all this data as well as the work of our colleagues (in particular the survey carried out by Mediapart in 2014 and the regional press), we end up with a non-exhaustive, but significant panorama of the links which unite the deputies to their collaborators.

Between one and eight collaborators per MEP

A deputy has a credit of 9,561 euros per month intended to pay up to five collaborators in the National Assembly or in his constituency of origin. But he is free to hire less or more. The only limit lies in the fact of not allocating more than half of this sum in salary to a member of his direct family.

It appears that most MPs have chosen to work with three or four collaborators. Only three deputies are satisfied with a single assistant: it is Jean-Claude Fruteau (PS, Reunion), Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg (PRG, Val-de-Marne) and… François Fillon (LR).

The most extensive team is that of the deputy (Ecologist Party) for Loire-Atlantique, François de Rugy, who benefits from an increased envelope as vice-president of the National Assembly and employs eight people. Several committee chairmen or vice-chairmen have six or seven staff.

If we can calculate that having four or three collaborators makes it possible to pay them between 2,300 and 3,200 euros gross each on average, the list published by the Assembly does not specify either the working time or the salary of each. However, it sometimes happens that some assistants only work a few hours a month, as we learned with the #TransparenceAN questionnaire: an employee of Christine Pirès-Beaune (PS, Puy-de-Dôme) is only employed four hours a week, when that of Yves Jégo (UDI, Seine-et-Marne) works very precisely 12.7 hours per week and that three assistants of Jonas Tahuaitu (LR, Polynesia) share a full time…

As for Karine Gautreau and Jessica Masson, who have worked (almost) full time at the Socialist Party headquarters since 2014, they are still parliamentary assistants to the deputy and first secretary of the party, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis… but at the rate of thirty hours per month , for “a few hundred euros” of monthly remuneration.

More than one MEP in six employs a relative

At the origin of our #TransparenceAN survey, we wanted to remove the opacity on the employment of a loved one with public money, and to check whether François Fillon's choice to employ his wife (and children) was exceptional. The answer is no.

After our written request to the deputies – from which we are still awaiting more than half of the replies – and the examination of the list published by the Assembly, we have drawn up a non-exhaustive list of 103 deputies (i.e. nearly 18%) who hired one or more family members; eight of them even employed two.

Most of these family collaborators have a direct link with the MNA, whether it be marital or filial. These are the only relations whose remuneration is supervised by the financial services of the Assembly.

However, we have identified a few rarer cases of cousins, brothers or sisters, and even a granddaughter, that of Francis Hillmeyer (UDI, Haut-Rhin). The study of family ties also reveals personal stories of deputies who have separated from their wives but continue to work with her, or elected officials who have married their assistants.

Although the profession of parliamentary assistant is predominantly female (59%), this proportion is even higher among employees who have a family link with the MP. We reach very exactly 70% of women for 30% of men.

The distribution is fairly fair between sons (21) and daughters (24), but is very unbalanced when we look at spouses: only six women MPs employ their husbands, while forty-five elected men work with their wives or partners. .

No parliamentary group escapes the practice of family collaborators. Even among the fourteen members of the Democratic and Republican left, there is a member who employs his wife. However, the practice is much more widespread on the right (25% among the Republicans, nearly 30% in the UDI) than on the left (11.8% of the socialist group).

Thirty-six substitutes hired

As soon as the list of collaborators was published by the National Assembly on Wednesday February 22, the weekly Marianne noticed that former Prime Minister Manuel Valls had hired his deputy Carlos da Silva as a collaborator after his return to the Hemicycle. A situation that may be strange, but neither illegal nor "one of a kind".

Indeed, thirty-six substitutes are currently employed as collaborators of their titular deputy. A particularly widespread practice in the Socialist Party (21), while a dozen Republican (LR) deputies are concerned.

Some "cumulators" of the links

Among the eight "cumulators" employing two members of their family, three LR elected officials did not respond spontaneously to our request for information: Jean-Pierre Gorges (Eure-et-Loir), who employs his wife and daughter (and is, moreover, in the running for the presidential election), Marc-Philippe Daubresse (Nord), who employs his partner and the son of the latter, and Patrice Martin-Lalande (Loir-et-Cher), who employs his wife and his son. The others responded to us as part of the #TransparenceAN operation or after our direct requests.

Various reactions and justifications

The Fillon affair did not leave the deputies indifferent and the corporatist reactions aroused sometimes resulted in astonishing arguments. “By constantly sniping the elected officials, you will manage to disgust the most motivated. And then you will see what it is to have no one to turn to, to come up against doors that no longer open, absurd decisions that you can no longer change, etc. It will be too late to regret, ”warns Jacques Lamblin (LR, Meurthe-et-Moselle) on his Facebook page.

Asked about the employment of his wife, Valérie, as a collaborator, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (DLF, Essonne) justifies himself: “If she did not work with me, we would never see each other. " Jean-Pierre Gorges (LR, Eure-et-Loir), for his part, explained on RMC: "It's interesting, because when I do stupid things, she [her daughter Mathilde] allows herself to tell me. , unlike someone else who would be less frank. »

The responses we have received provide a Prévert-like inventory of the tasks assigned to their collaborators: Pascal Demarthe (PS, Somme) explains that his wife manages his deputy's allowance and has been assigned communication and monitoring of Facebook and Twitter pages. It provides "photographic reports during trips to constituencies and at weekends (general assemblies, demonstrations, etc.), the organization of events (public meetings, vows ceremony, etc.), the reception of groups in visit to the National Assembly and finally she [him] also serves as a driver very often”.

Karine Gautreau, she takes care of what "nobody is able to do" in the parliamentary team of Jean-Christophe Cambadélis (PS, Paris), since his departure to Solférino, such as the organization of trips ⁱⁿ the 19th arrondissement.

Unfinished Transparency

These family ties that we make public will not, however, be complete until parliamentarians are required to publish this information: on the one hand, there are all the parliamentarians who have not replied to us (or have lied to us) and do not have the same surname as their family collaborators.

There is also another criticized practice, cross-hiring, which consists of employing one's son or daughter as a parliamentary assistant to a fellow MP, so as not to have to declare family ties. We only found two proven cases of deputies employing one the son (Edouard Santais), the other the daughter of another deputy (Maryll Vignal), but they are perhaps more numerous.